[Chicago-talk] books and perl

[Ed Summers]

On the subject of books and Perl...

About a year ago I wrote a short Perl program to interact with Amazon's Web 
Services which looks for items on my wishlist that are available for cheap. 
Cheap being < 50% of the cover price, or < $5. When items are found the 
programs drops me an email with the citation, price and URL to quickly 
purchase it.

So all I do is put this in my cron: 

    wishlist --token=MYAMAZONTOKEN --wishlist=WISHLISTID --email=ehs at pobox.com

and like magic I get an email when I can get something I want for cheap. This 
includes used book stores from across the country, which have great quality.

The 'cheapness' is configurable, so if you only want to know when items
are < 30% of the cover price, or less than $7.50 you could put this in 
your cron.

    wishlist --token=MYAMAZONTOKEN --wishlist=WISHLISTID --email=ehs at pobox.com
        --sale=.30 --cheap=7.50 

If you have a wishlist and enjoy this sort of thing you can look at the docs
or grab the code [1,2]. The code isn't the prettiest, but it's worked for a 
year, and has caused the stack of books next to my bedstand to teeter
dangerously.

//Ed

[1] http://www.inkdroid.org/code/tools/wishlist.html
[2] http://www.inkdroid.org/code/tools/wishlist